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Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan

By Brian Prisco | Books | May 21, 2009 |

By Brian Prisco | Books | May 21, 2009 |


Yea, verily, I have completed a mighty task. Slowly, did I trek through this hearty banquet of a novel, taking nearly a month and a half to complete it as I journeyed through other novels along the way. And forsooth, would I be loathe to explain my feelings on Book 6 of a 12 or potentially 14 book series, each of which are clocking in at 1000 pages a clip. I will say that once again, the Wheel of Time is like watching most long running television dramas. It’s a huge sprawling work, and so we’re weaving around through tons and tons of characters, a huge cast, and so he touches on them here or there. It staggers around for a long stretch of time, and then hits you with all the action in the finale. And Lord of Chaos gets ugly towards the end.

But what this marks is a close to a huge chapter of the Cannonball Read. Once I started taking recommendations, I was bombarded with fantasy. Most of this was my own doing, taking public my wading through of Jordan’s massivepiece, and thus people were quick to belittle Jordan (alright, well, me too) and hurl huge selections at me. I snagged as many starters as I could.

Thus, I read the first two Song of Ice and Fire, The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss — the first Kingkiller; the first First Law book by Joe Abercrombie, the first Robin Hobb, the first two Temeraire, and the first half of the Wheel of Time. My Kindle is fit to burst with the followups to most of these, as well as the first few of the Discworld novels, the Arabesk series, and even more fantasy that I found scouring the interwebs for the others.

But alas, with the Lord of Chaos closed, I look to my final fifteen books as fantasy free. (Unless you count Sookie Stackhouse - got one more of those up my sleeve). No more will dragons or dwarves or assassins or Athan’Miere or orcs or oliphaunts cross my eyes until I put a close on this contest. I thank you for your suggestions on fantasy, and I only hope my own little quest and the cannonade of recs were picked up by others. Hopefully a few more of you will crack the nerdlinger crease and check out a few sword and sorcery pieces.

Either way, onwards and upwards into the classics. Hopefully the lingering memory of saidan will get me through Dosteofvsky and Steinbeck. Tally ho!

This review is part of the Cannonball Read series. For more of Prisco’s reviews, check out his blog, The Gospel According to Prisco.